The impact crunched up through Tom’s boot sole and into back and gut, killing his forward motion—and the Afrikaner, who was thrown back with a broken neck and his jaw torn three-quarters off, dangling by a shred of cartilage. Tom jackknifed in midair, coming down in a crouch with his great hands ready to strike or grab.
The third rebel was occupied; he was wrestling with Roy Tully and letting his Uzi submachine gun bounce between them on its sling as he struggled to keep control of Tully’s right wrist, the one with the long knife gleaming in it. Even as Tom set himself the man doubled over in uncontrollable reflex; Tully had driven a knee into his crotch. A second later Tom hammered the bladed palm of his right hand into the back of the man’s neck; he could feel bone shatter, and there was a sound like a green branch snapping with a crunch, hideously familiar.
“Where’s number four?” Tully asked, panting and glaring around, the knife moving in little unconscious circles.
“Running,” Tom said, drawing deep shuddering breaths. “But not for long.”
The fourth man—the youngster who’d brought his elders their last meal—was halfway down the slope to his horse. Not running in blind panic, either; he was keeping quiet and keeping on his feet, obviously set to ride out for help.
Kolomusnim was behind him, gaining fast, a silent streak of brown motion through the blackness of the night. He leaped with tiger speed; starlight flashed on the steel in his hand as he landed on the yellow-haired youth’s back. They rolled downslope, and there was a scream, then a long bubbling shriek of agony, and another.
Tom winced slightly, but there was no time to linger. Not that anyone would want to, among the corpses twitching with the last motions of the dead, the death stink mingling nauseatingly with the smell of blood and food and cordite. He and Tully went out of the observation pit with almost identical vaulting leaps, moving eastward up the pass toward the next position.
He went nearly limp with relief when Adrienne rose short of it. “No problems,” she said. “Piet talked to them, and then…”
Tom looked past her into the pit. One man had a huge diagonal slash across his neck, from the collarbone on the right side to slightly past the middle on the left, opening the jugular and windpipe. Adrienne was pouring water from her canteen over her right hand, and the sopping cuff of her bush jacket above it. As for the rest… one had the side of his skull dished in, and the other looked as if someone very strong had put one hand behind his head, the other on his face, and turned his head around until it looked between his shoulder blades.
Ecch, Tom thought.
He could do that himself, but the method said something about the man. The disgust was welcome. A little cold observer at the back of his mind reminded him that he’d just missed getting a hollow-point bullet through the gut. Missed by about six inches of random chance; disliking Botha helped push the knowledge further down.
Jim Simmons was a dozen yards on, covering the entrance to the pass with his scope-sighted rifle. Botha was using a walkie-talkie he’d found in the observation post, his square dark face even more unreadable than ever, between the dimness and the night-sight goggles.
“Told them that young Johannes thought a bear was an Indian and shot it up,” he said when he’d clicked off the set. “And to save some dishes ready for him to clean to teach him fire discipline.” He nodded toward the man with the slit throat; he’d been big, red-haired where he wasn’t grizzled. “Andries there had a voice like mine—we both came from the Cape, too. When we go after the rest of them at the camp we can use our guns; if these had been overrun by Indians, the boseman would have taken their guns.”
Adrienne nodded, with a slight grimace at the stinking destruction. “We’ll have to take everything useful, and the scalps as well,” she said. “Make this look like an Indian raid.”
Simmons came back. “Kolo will take care of that,” he said.
Tom looked at him. “Kolo really doesn’t like white men much, does he?” he asked quietly.
Simmons shrugged. “No, with a few individual exceptions,” he said. “In his position… would you?”
“Why’s he working with you New Virginians, then?” Tully said, looking behind them.
The Indian came trotting up; both his arms were red to the elbows, and he was smiling. A string of scalps hung in a dripping bag from his waist.
“Because it’s the best way to protect his wife and kids, I suppose,” Simmons said. He sighed. “And because it’s always better to be on the winning side. Let’s get going.”
Henry Villers tied the horses in the mouth of the pass below the second observation post and scrambled up. The others were crouched a few yards below it, except for Kolo still at his grim work. Villers gave it a single glance, then shook his head and joined the others.
“Man, that dude has some serious anger-management problems,” he observed.
“Yes,” Tom said soberly. The bodies have to be mutilated. The Mohave always do that. “Try not to let it get to you.”
To his surprise, Villers laughed. “It don’t bother me none,” he said. “Warden Tom, you’ve got to remember what these Boer mo’fo’s had in mind, why they’re helping this essence-of-putrescence capital-E e-vile plot. And man, it had to start on the top of the evil tree and hit every branch on the way down to get me risking my precious one-and-only black ass to pull John Rolfe’s chestnuts out of the fire! Personal considerations aside—and it’s hard to put you and your family getting killed aside—can you imagine what these trek boys would do over in Africa, with the Collettas and Batyushkovs running the Commission and shipping them all the modern conveniences, like for starters napalm and automatic weapons, to use on my alternate-world spear-chuckin’ cousins? Maybe the people they conquered would rise up eventually, but that might take centuries, and can you imagine what they’d do till then?”
Tom nodded, feeling his gloom lift. Tully came up with the Bren gun. “Ready to handle this?” he asked Villers.
“Hell, yes,” Villers said cheerfully. “Good gun. The melancholy Dane’s been brooding at me here.”
“I know how you feel,” Tully said. “Sweet Christ, do I know how you feel.”
“He does the Hamlet with you too?” Villers asked.
“Oh, incessantly. Gloom, guilt, silences, despair. Well, you know Danes.”
“How do you stand it?”
“I keep refusing to marry him, for starters,” Tully said seriously. “You know how it is—you can’t really change someone that way, no matter what they promise.”
“Sociopaths,” Tom said, grinning. “Both of you. And it’s Norway my folks came from, not Denmark. Hamlet was probably half Swedish. Danes are too goddamned hygge to brood.”
“What’s that?” Villers asked curiously. “Hi-ge? Huggy? Some Scandinavian brand of kink?”
“H-Y-double-G-E. Sort of like ‘cute’ or ‘cozy,’ but not so sternly unyielding, and without the harsh overtones. Did you think it was an accident Denmark’s greatest contributions to world culture were Tuborg, a sweet fruit pastry and the Little Fucking Mermaid?”
Adrienne was a little way off, sitting behind a bush and looking down into the valley with the high-tech binoculars, her elbows on her knees. Botha sat beside her, making notes on a map. She spoke, raising her voice without taking her eyes from the glasses. “If you three have finished with the male-bonding thing, could you come over here for a moment?” she said dryly.
They did, crouching low. West and north the valley floor opened out, silvery in the moonlight even without their night-sight goggles. Save for the area along the river and some of the washes that came down from the south, there was little of the dense growth that covered much of the coastlands. It was replaced by a savanna of knee-length grass, scattered with big round-topped oaks, sagebrush and cactus on dry sandy spots, and the odd walnut tree. A mile away a campfire flickered in the night—the rebels were keeping up the pretense of being an innocent hunting party.